Kill Screen: Quidditch and How to Play: Ninja

We recently announced a partnership between Pitchfork and the videogame arts and culture magazine Kill Screen and, going forward, we're highlighting some of Kill Screen's most interesting content.

This week, featured pieces include a look at Quidditch games on college campuses by Brian Taylor, and Lana Polansky's tutorial on how to play Ninja, both taken from Kill Screen's latest printing, the Public Play Issue, which is available now.

Start Snitchin'

By Brian Taylor

"It would be nothing without the brooms," an enthusiastic college student explains to a group standing on the edge of a field where 14 other students are running, brooms in thighs.

It's the first University of Pittsburgh Quidditch Club scrimmage of 2011.

"Quidditch" is a game invented by J. K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series of books, which-- you probably know-- is about an English boy at a boarding school for witches and wizards. And because you can't have an English boarding-school book without sport ("the playing fields of Eton," and all that), Quidditch is introduced in the first novel as the magical world's equivalent of soccer. Or basketball. Or rugby.

Rowling often blends the mundane with the fantastic to make her world both accessible and exotic. The social structure of quidditch-- teams that represent schools or cities or countries, with fan attire like posters and scarves-- is pure British football.

The rules are another matter-- stick with me, because there's going to be some crazy terminology. In Rowling's universe, players fly above a large field on magic brooms and try to score in one of two ways: They throw a ball called a quaffle through one of three hoops at each end of the field, or they catch a smaller, golden ball called a snitch.

In quaffle play, each team has a keeper who attempts to stop the opposing team from throwing the quaffle through their hoops (each goal being worth 10 points). Armed with bats, two beaters (offensive linemen) hit bludgers (magic iron balls that fly through the air and knock participants off their brooms) toward their opponents and away from their teammates. For clarity's sake, I'll refer to this as the "field game."

Most sports are limited spatially by the bounds of the field and chronologically by the clock. The Quidditch field game is played within the confines of the pitch, but there is no time limit. The game doesn't end until the snitch is caught.

The snitch is a tiny golden ball with a pair of wings that can fly anywhere. No pesky field binds the snitch. Each team has one seeker, whose job it is to catch the snitch. When the snitch is caught, the game is over and that seeker's team is awarded 150 points: enough to all but guarantee the team that catches the snitch wins.

This is a broken game.

That's because Rowling designed Quidditch to showcase the hero, Harry Potter. Rowling divided Harry's school, Hogwarts, into four houses. Each house has a Quidditch team, and they compete during the school year. Harry tries out for the team and discovers, despite having been raised with no knowledge of magic (let alone Quidditch), that he takes after his father and is a natural at playing seeker. Harry plays the one position that doesn't have to follow the same rules as everyone else.

And so the majority of the characters on the field play their hardest, while the fate of the game rests on the performance of two competing individuals chasing a golden ball flying through the sky. As Ian Bogost, discussing the videogame Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup, puts it in Persuasive Games:

Quidditch enforces a procedural rhetoric of individual power, in which a golden boy uses extraordinary talent to overcome adversity. Harry's position as seeker thus reinforces the mystical, transcendental nature of his power, a major theme in the series... . Although it may be technically possible to win a Quidditch match on the field, the books and films privilege the snitch-capture victory, one in which the frail underdog uses transcendent power to defeat the brute strength of legitimate athleticism.

But "legitimate athleticism" is the point of competitive sport. The rules can't favor one team over another; it's their athleticism (and the strategy of their coaches) that results in victory.

Since the first Harry Potter novel's publishing in 1997, many attempts have been made to create a real-life, playable version of Quidditch. Card games, tabletop games (with a motorized snitch!), elementary-school hallway games involving bounce and Nerf balls: All take different approaches to simulating the game.

Which is the first weird thing about Quidditch as a sport-- it's a simulation of something else. An adaptation. It has a theme.

Generally, sports don't have a theme. Football is football; baseball is baseball. While they may be used as a metaphor for something else (or as a sublimation of geographical hostilities), kicking a ball is kicking a ball; it's not launching a rocket through space.

But Quidditch has magic, and so there are aspects of it-- flight, magical winged balls, being knocked off a broomstick-- that must be simulated. Things have to stand for other things.

The International Quidditch Association has been the most successful, blending three separate games into one simulation of an impossible team sport.

///

Middlebury is a liberal arts college in western Vermont that lists among its athletic facilities two ski areas (one for downhill, one for cross country) and an 18-hole golf course. The Simpsons' Snake Jailbird is an alumnus.

A bronze sculpture of a dog catching a Frisbee sits in front of one of the campus halls. Frisbee Dog, by Patrick Villiers Farrow, commemorates the claim that five Middlebury fraternity brothers were the first to toss Frisbie Pie Company tins back and forth while fixing a flat tire in Nebraska. "Frisbee is ours!" it declares. (Yale, whose campus is near the Frisbie Pie Company, disagrees.)

Maybe this disputed claim has something to do with how well Middlebury's players have documented the origin of real-world Quidditch. An email sent on Oct. 6, 2005 by Middlebury College student Xander Manshel invited people to a "wacky event," an "expedition into the magical world of HARRY POTTER." (There are no fewer than five colors in the email, as well as all-caps sentences, multiple typefaces, underlines, and italics.) The first game of "Muggle Quidditch" was played on Sunday, Oct. 9. "Muggle" is the Harry Potter world's term for non-wizards.

Manshel headed up a weekly bocce group at Middlebury; Alexe Benepe, now head of the International Quidditch Association, was one of the players. "We had a great time. We'd dress up in sort-of faux European outfits, like tweed jackets and ties and hats, and heckle each other in British accents," recalls Benepe. Quidditch took the place of this weekly bocce game. "I was actually pretty skeptical at first, but I agreed to give it a try. And I helped [Xander] get people motivated, and get them out the door. We got around 30 people from our hall to come out on the first day, and it was a huge success. That's the transition from bocce to Quidditch."

The game was played on Battell Beach, a large, grassy area on campus that, as far as I can tell from maps, is completely landlocked. The first four Quidditch World Cups, 2005 through 2009, were held here, although the first two were played by Middlebury teams.

Manshel passed responsibility for organizing the Middlebury games on to Benepe in 2006, and the 2007 World Cup championship match was played between the winning Middlebury team and a group from Vassar (brought there by Woodrow Travers, a friend of Manshel). Middlebury College Quidditch became the Intercollegiate Quidditch Association. 2008 and 2009 saw significant increases in participation, and in 2010 Benepe and the tournament moved to NYC. The Intercollegiate Quidditch Association was renamed the International Quidditch Association, and became a non-profit in New York.

Says Benepe, "The event outgrew Middlebury. In 2009 we had over 2000 spectators. That's a quarter of the [campus] population. We could have kept it there and maybe bumped it up to 3000 or 4000, but instead we moved it to New York City and got 15,000." According to Benepe, a clipping company estimated the event received more than two million digital and print views.

///

One challenge of adapting Quidditch to real life lies in transforming a literary invention into a balanced contest where skill and strategy matter. The greater challenge involves getting around the lack of, you know, magic. You can't fly. Neither can the bludgers, or the snitch. You can pretend to fly, though. And you can throw the bludgers. But the snitch is a problem.

The International Quidditch Association's official rules employ a Snitch Runner-- an athlete clad head-to-toe in gold clothing carrying a tennis ball stuffed in a sock and tucked into their waistband. In IQA rules, the seekers and the Snitch Runner are engaged in an elaborate game of cross-country flag-tag with two Its.

To successfully capture the snitch, a seeker must pull the ballsock from the Snitch Runner's waistband while the runner is upright. If they tackle the runner, they have to let them get back up and run off with a three-second head start.

In early IQA quidditch games, Manshel suggested the snitch be worth 50 points-- much less than the books' 150. Later on, when they shortened the length of games for tournament play, they dropped the snitch points to 30. The real-life snitch can only be a deciding factor in a close game.

Snitch Running is a combination of cross-country distance running, wrestling, and gymnastics. This sounds kind of absurd, until you listen to Benepe describe Rainey Johnson, the snitch at that first game on Battell Beach. "Rainey used to be a wrestler in high school. He was a varsity cross-country runner, so he'd do 15-mile runs in the morning with the team, and then he would come out and play Quidditch for an hour.

"He'd do like tumbles and flips and somersaults and backflips, and so on, to get away from people. At some point he began to bring in some physical moves, too, kind of tossing people on the ground." Before Johnson came up with the idea to use a sock, the tennis ball was taped to his back.

The manual encourages the Snitch Runner to showboat:

The Snitch is essentially a malevolent spirit whose sole task is to evade capture. His secondary goal is to humiliate his pursuers. He can run from them, hide from them, throw them to the ground, or dodge away just as they dive for him and leave them eating his dust. A background in competitive wrestling and/or gymnastics is encouraged.

The Snitch should be able to do simple acrobatic maneuvers. Handsprings, rolls, somersaults, and even flips are all useful to evade capture.

In general, creative, humorous, and surprising maneuvers by the Snitch Runner are an essential aspect of the game.

In encouraging the snitch runner to be entertaining, the IQA rules underscore the spectacle of the snitch chase. And by having a human being act as the snitch, they embody it with a personality that other solutions (like bouncing rubber balls) lack.

That's the seeker game. The field game is rugby with brooms. Chasers pass the quaffle (a volleyball) down the pitch and try to get it through a goal that's guarded by a keeper; a goal is still worth 10 points. Given that the goal is actually three hula hoops on poles, and that you can throw the ball, or kick it, or do pretty much anything to move it down the field, and that you're holding a broom between your legs, this part of the game plays less like rugby and more like that crazy game your gym teacher invented for rainy days.

The third part of the game plays like dodgeball. The beaters' defensive job is to throw dodgeballs at the other team. If a player is hit, they have to run back and touch their goal before they can reenter play.

Originally, Manshel's rules required players who were hit by bludgers to spin in place five times, a move Benepe says they later decided was "too silly for a sport." According to Benepe, the new rule "also demands a higher level of fitness. Even though the field is short [an elliptic 30x48 yards], because of the bludger rule players are constantly sprinting back and forth across the field. When you take into account that you're also holding a broom between your legs, it's very exhausting."

Though the beaters throw dodgeballs instead of tackling, there's still the potential for collision-- and with that, the potential for broom-related injuries. Benepe, ever the official: "I think a pretty common one is people getting hit in the face with a broom. Definitely some bloody lips here-- we encourage players to wear mouthguards." Eyebrows have been busted and noses broken, but Benepe insists the players don't mind. "If you're in a position where you get hurt pretty badly, it's probably because you were playing a little bit dangerously. Like, when you leveled your head and charged at that guy you sort of knew what you were in for."

When I pointed out that it was surprising the brooms in the crotch didn't cause more of a problem, Benepe grew thoughtful: "Yeah, they surprisingly do not. I think players understand, you know, it might be because they're in such a sensitive location of the body, the players intrinsically just sort of watch where they're pointing them."

Warner Brothers has no official Quidditch presence, though Benepe maintains they "keep an open dialogue." There's no official endorsement in the manual the IQA publishes for the 60-plus "official member teams" that pay yearly dues, or the at-least-twice-that-many unofficial teams. In some ways, it's like a folk game: groups have taken the IQA rules and adapted. "These guys emailed us, told us they play Quidditch in Turkey-- they said they play it like us, but they bury the snitch in the ground. They didn't explain it any further-- whether the seekers have shovels, how that works."

As if how Quidditch itself works is self-evident: Unless you can clench a minimum-40-inch (regulation size: 42-inch) stick with your thighs and run, you're going to be playing a one-handed, simultaneous dodgeball-and-rugby match with three cross-country runners-- one dressed in yellow with a sock hanging out of their pants, and two also holding brooms between their legs-- occasionally dashing across the field of play.

I had to see it in action.

///

The Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh is a 42-story office and classroom building. As overenthusiastic undergraduate tour guides point out, it is the tallest university building in the Western hemisphere. There's a flagpole, or a lightning rod, on top of it-- the guides often aren't really sure.

As a space, it's designed to evoke European cathedrals (hence "The Cathedral of Learning" and not "The Skyscraper of Learning" or "The Office Block of Learning"), albeit one where knowledge is deity.

The exterior of the building shares the Common Room's aesthetic, but not its construction. It's a Gothic skin stretched over 40 stories of skyscraper-- much to the chagrin of Frank Lloyd Wright, who called it the "world's largest 'Keep Off the Grass' sign."

But here on that grass, on the first day of spring, the University of Pittsburgh Quidditch Club holds its first scrimmage of the season under a looming Gothic Revival skyscraper whose construction is modern but whose façade is not.

The field is set up between the Cathedral and the neo-Gothic Heinz Chapel. The grass is pretty dead from ROTC marches and kickball games. Three hula hoops duct taped to PVC pipe posts bookend a field of college students, brooms firmly between their legs, dashing around and shouting things like "Watch out for the bludger!" and "Wait, aren't you two on the same team?"

The club's tournament team took third place in the 2010 Quidditch World Cup in New York City last fall. Because this is just a scrimmage, no one is wearing uniforms or the headbands that indicate their position. A middle-aged man, docent at the chapel, sees me watching. "Answer me this," he says, thinking I'm with this club. "Why do they have brooms jammed up their ass?"

"Uh," I hesitate. "It's a Harry Potter thing." He shakes his head and ponders out loud the dangers the brooms pose, especially to the male anatomy.

Other spectators are more generous. A few pre-freshman students visiting the campus think it's awesome. Their parents are confused.

But it's the brooms that everyone wants to talk about. Always the brooms.

The brooms are key to the game's identity, because they make things difficult. Since players must always hold them with either their hands or thighs, their motion is limited. Because of the brooms, the quaffle and bludgers are not fully inflated, allowing all players to grasp them with one hand, regardless of palm size.

But the broom is also a talisman that frees players from any self-consciousness about their appearance. No matter how ungainly you might be on your feet, when you've got the broom there, that is what people remember. Defeating humiliation with self-determination-- these players are going to look silly on their own terms. They own it.

As the players run across the field, passing the quaffle, leaping and tackling and shouting, a situation arises about which there is no clear information in the rules. Someone's broom or leg was hit with a bludger before or after they tossed the quaffle, and no one is sure who should take possession.

It's a practice, a scrimmage without referees. They argue until one of the players recalls a similar situation from last year's World Cup, and the rest of the group agrees to follow that precedent.

I do not see a Snitch Runner-- because the snitch game is so detached from the field game, it's possible for teams to practice without one. I am disappointed that I don't get to hear the crowd's reaction to that.

Later, a group of middle-aged men and a couple of teenagers come out of the Cathedral. Judging from their appearance, the older men are alumni, probably old college friends. The teenagers share a resemblance with the tallest of the men. I hear one of the teens, bored, explaining the game to his father and his friends. It's hard for them to see what's going on as everyone is gathered at the far goal.

One of the chasers makes a break with the quaffle and bolts down the field. The other chasers surround him, and the opposing team's beaters can't get a clear shot with the bludgers. As the group gets closer, the teen's explanation becomes more animated. When the chaser makes a dramatic leap into the air and throws the quaffle through one of the hoops, the men behind me cheer.

Panting, red-faced, exhausted, these kids are giving the game their all. There's no self-consciousness, no time for make-believe. On this Sunday afternoon, away from the crowds of the Quidditch World Cup and the performance of Harry Potter fandom, there is only the game. The rules are the rules. The play's the thing. And they mean it.